Tag Archives: Active Directory

A CloudShare hosted environment is a great way to quickly and easily provision virtual machines for demo and testing. In order to present realistic demo and test scenarios you will want a variety of Active Directory user accounts and SharePoint user profiles including My Sites profile information.

A brand new CloudShare environment virtual machine comes with only a few system accounts defined, eg Administrator. You can certainly develop and provision additional user accounts and profiles yourself, along with the scripts to repeat the provisioning each time your environment is refreshed. However, this will take time and effort, which you would probably rather spend on your core business activities. So why not leverage and re-purpose a ready-built alternative from Microsoft.

Microsoft publishes “content packs” to provision several of its popular demo environments (WingTip, etc) that you may have seen at the SharePoint Conference and in other training and demo presentations. These content packs generally include all the installers, scripts, and user accounts data files necessary to fully automate deployment, configuration and provisioning of the various bits of server infrastructure.

In our case we have the server infrastructure already deployed and configured thanks to CloudShare. So we are going to cherry pick out of the content packs just what is necessary to provision a predefined set of user accounts into Active Directory and user profiles into SharePoint. This will save us quite a bit of time over developing similar capability from scratch.

Don’t be confused by the name of this CodePlex project. The various content packs in this project can be used somewhat independently of one another, for our purpose to provision Active Directory user accounts and SharePoint user profiles in a CloudShare environment SharePoint farm.